[rhacker]

It's like this beast that does these benevolent things, but at some point it catches up to them and they shut something down after getting people kinda hooked. For example Picasa - massively popular - free and pretty amazing desktop photo management tool. It slowly morphed such that all of the users of it were just folded into a cloud offering: Drive.

Chrome and all of it's open source awesomeness, again, mostly used to fold people into the bigger profitable picture. So even though there are developers that work at Google creating protocols that help everyone, including non-Chrome browsers - that benevolence has a product manager paying that developer's time. At some stage it's not all free beer.